Flowering Dogwood Cornus florida
Flowering Dogwood is a perennial tree native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 30 ft and blooms Mar in full sun, with red fruit. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
Cornus florida, the flowering dogwood or American dogwood, is a species of flowering tree in the family Cornaceae native to eastern North America and northern Mexico. An endemic population once spanned from southernmost coastal Maine south to northern Florida and west to the Mississippi River. The tree is commonly planted as an ornamental in residential and public areas because of its showy bracts and interesting bark structure. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun
- Soil & moisture
- Low moisture
- Soil pH
- 4.8–7.7
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5+
- Drought tolerance
- Moderate
- Shade tolerance
- High
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Low waterlogging
- Height
- 30 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 35 ft wide open-grown, the broad end of measured crowns
- Spacing
- 4–6 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Moderate
- Growth form
- Multiple stems
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Red persists into winter
- Flower colour
- White AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
- Propagate by
- Seed, Cuttings, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Spring – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Medium moderately palatable
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~118 caterpillar species
Cornus supports ~118 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is an exceptional genus.
Recorded feeding on Cornus in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 9 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Cornus is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
9 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Flowering Dogwood :
+ 3 more bees → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 36 birds · 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Flowering Dogwood — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 36 birds species (fruit, seed, browse) — the most-recorded:
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 823 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Flowering Dogwood, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Cornus →
How we know this (4) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (40) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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